"With The Man Who Fell to Earth I wanted to get rid of any sense of time, because it's surprising how often we mention it in our lives. One thing got by us until the cutting - I suddenly heard someone say 'I've been here three months already'. I thought 'How did that get in?"

[SFX magazine, 1999]

Following the hat-trick of Performance, Walkabout and Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth presents a tale more far-reaching in its geography and themes.

Financed from the UK in what proved to be the dying days of British Lion, MWFTE is located almost exclusively in a United States Roeg films with his habitual outsider's view.

It charts the rise and fall of one Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien we see crash-landing on earth in human form at the film's start (it worth noticing his landing is not only witnessed by us, the viewer, either...

Thanks to a roster of revolutionary product patents - many of them now oddly familiar - Newton builds a business empire, and we begin to see flashes of his hidden motive : space-travel to his 'home' planet and family, perishing without fresh water.

Before he's successful, however, he's derailed by booze and TV, and corporate institutions ensure his downfall (the Icarus reference is there if you look …)

MWFTE's cult status revolves largely around the indelible presence of David Bowie as Newton : his copper curtain of hair remains one of his most enduring '70s iconographic 'looks'.

It's a fascinating use of a pop icon, not without potential pitfalls, as Bowie's own subsequent film career has intermittently shown. Notably, Roeg seems unique in consistently finding the strengths within the media baggage (think also of Jagger in Performance, and Art Garfunkel in Bad Timing [1980]).

Plans for a full Bowie soundtrack were eventually thwarted, but you do see him sing briefly … off-key !

MWFTE also started Roeg's collaboration with screenwriter Paul Mayersberg, who adapted Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and the recent Croupier, which continued with Eureka some six years later. There's a distinct cosmic edge to both movies. One of many MWFTE's sub-texts - the corporatisation of America - also marks it out in the Roeg oeuvre, and mirrors the intrusions of a supposedly 'civilized' world into the Walkabout journey. By the film's end, our perspective is more Newton's, and not that of our fellow earthlings.

It's also another great cinematic study of time, and touches particularly interesting bases with Insignificance, also in this season. Watch out for how trains crop up in each film ………..